About

Work Experience

CV-Library is the UK’s leading independent job board and an area expert in recruitment. It hosts over 170,000 jobs across all sectors for the UK’s jobseekers, and supports recruiters and employers with their services.

I am part of the development team focused on bringing new features into the site.

Voiceable is an enterprise to develop an effective and science-based approach for evaluating the delivery of public speakers, and offer coaching when necessary. After considerable research and development, a working prototype will soon be released.

My work is mainly in developing the tools for the acoustic analysis underlying the evaluation of speech.

As part of the technical team, I am also in charge of implementing the AWS worker nodes that handle the client requests.

The CloudCAST project aims to make it possible for researchers, developers, and clinicians to create tools that benefit from state-of-the-art developments in speech technologies. When active, developers will be able to connect their applications to the service and receive speech recognition using recognisers trained on a per-user level.

Part of my responsibilities included the design of the API that will handle both the management of user projects and the training and use of speech recognisers.

My job also included the implementation of the bridge between our applications and the underlying ASR library. Currently, this means interacting with Kaldi using a GStreamer pipeline

I was also in charge of the administration of the main project machine

Besides designing the base architecture, I have released multiple modules covering selection management, smart generation of GUI wizards, enabling support for variadic procedures, JSON serialisation and deserialisation, and a pure-Praat implementation of the printf family of functions

Bringing support for automated testing in Praat included writing a Praat plugin for producing TAP output with an interface closely modeled after that of Test::More

Volunteer Work

Praat is a GPL-licensed acoustic analysis software extensively used in Phonetics research. It uses an internal scripting language for automating tasks.

I am active in the users list, and I’m the most active responder in the Praat category in StackOverflow

I am an expert user of Praat, specialising particularly in its programmatic use

Being this involved in the community has allowed me to collaborate with many different people including researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs both in the development of new tools and in the role of professional consultant

I’ve written multiple syntax lexers for Praat, which are now shipped with Rouge (Ruby), Pygments (Python), Kate (XML), and ace (JavaScript)

Awards

The BecasChile Scholarship, assigned by the Chilean government, provides support for overseas graduate studies. This scholarship fully financed my PhD studies in both London and Amherst, MA.

Scholarship for Research Studies

MEXT

2009-04-01

MEXT (the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) grants scholarships for graduate and undergraduate overseas students. I was granted a 2-year scholarship to attend the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies to undertake the research that lead to my PhD.

Scholarship for Short-term Studies

JASSO

2006-09-01

The Japan Student Services Organization offers support for undergraduate students to attend Japanese universities for cultural and academic exchange. With this scholarship, I wa able to attend the University of Tokyo for a year as a part of their AIKOM exchange program.